As Far As Forever
by Ellarose C
Summary: Tell me," she ordered. I wasn't sure I understood. "Sorry?" "Tell me why it's beautiful," she said softly, closing her sightless eyes and turning her face into me. fluffy Taang one-shot


We were going nowhere - killing time to watch it die, so to speak. We were nineteen and in love, a fact that never ceased to be a topic of debate among friends and enemies alike. We didn't care.

It was raining when we set out, a fine drizzle that would periodically shift between a downpour and a mist. She wanted to get out of the cold and the wet; I was only too happy to comply. Peace and fellowship are fine ideas in theory and moderation, but too much of either and a man starts to go a bit over the wall. Besides, we hadn't gone flying in such a long time.

Appa was restless when I finally coaxed him from the stables. He hated rain almost as much as he hated fire or being underground. She was waiting for me, shivering under the eaves of a building, expectation in her stance. I wondered at this; she hating flying even more than Appa hated being underground. I didn't comment on it, though - I was smarter than that by now - and I climbed onto my sky bison's head and helped her up as well, all the while in amicable silence.

"Take me away from this city," she grumbled, gripping my waist just tight enough to show she was scared. That one sentence explained a lot; she was just as tired of Ba Sing Se as I was. I wrapped my own arm around her tightly and 'yip-yip'ed Appa into the sky.

The rain-heavy clouds hung low over the expansive city. It was in the downpour stage right now, beating down on our heads and shoulders, but spurring Appa to rise quicker and her to pull part of my robes over her head as a shield. I smiled at their obvious discomfort while tilting my head back and taking in the raindrops in their entirety, welcoming their touch even as my skin prickled with her contact.

It didn't take long for Appa to break through the cloud barrier and get above the weather. Cautiously, almost disbelievingly, she poked her head out from under my robes. "It stopped," she observed, her tone full of awe. Appa shook himself of the water in midair, causing her to shriek and clutch me tighter and me to laugh as he twisted precariously in all directions.

"What did you expect?" I said in reply to her earlier statement after Appa recovered his balance. She didn't relinquish her grip. "Clouds don't go up forever." I looked around, giving Appa slack so he could meander across the air as he pleased. Out here above the clouds, the sun still shone, brighter and purer than ever seen on earth. "It's beautiful up here," I thought aloud quietly, almost in a whisper.

"Really?" she said sarcastically, and I winced. I hadn't forgotten her blindness, but my words made it sound like I had. "I wouldn't know."

"I know you don't," I consoled her, rubbing her back. She leaned her head against my chest.

"Tell me," she ordered. I wasn't sure I understood.

"Sorry?"

"Tell me why it's beautiful," she said softly, closing her sightless eyes and turning her face into me.

It was hard enough to think with her draped over me like that, but add on to that trying to explain sight to someone who's never seen? My eyes widened and my jaw dropped at the task. She waited, measuring my heartbeat for stability. I swallowed, then stammered out, "I-I'll try."

She nodded. She understood. I would do the best I could do.

I leaned back against my sky bison's body, unfolding my legs from under me and stretching them out between his horns. He groaned, but only as an acknowledgment of our new positions. I knew it took more than the two of us to unsettle him. She leaned back with me, not willing to part with her support in the sky, and was possibly even more closely entwined with me than before. I tried to banish the butterflies in my stomach as I pulled her in closer. She turned to lie on her side against me and wrapped both of her legs around my right one. Didn't she know how distracting that was? She started rubbing one foot up and down my shin, and my mind went blank, my heart sputtered. She grinned.

"Tell me, Aang," she repeated, reminding me of my assignment. I shook my head to clear it and tried to show her with words.

My mouth open to begin, I fished for words to start with, but I reeled it in without even a bite. How could I tell her about light and reflections? She had no prior knowledge to base it off of. I couldn't define colors for her without some prior knowledge.

Maybe I was approaching this the wrong way. I couldn't tell her using sight; maybe the other four senses could help.

I closed my eyes and focused on what I could translate from them. She was being overly patient with me; I guessed she wasn't in a rush to get her answer. She knew I would eventually get to the point, given time. her foot kept sliding up and down my leg, begging me to be distracted. I pushed it out of my mind with all my Avatar force and listened.

It was very quiet above the city noise. The clouds and space acted as a buffer for the sound. A bird of unidentifiable origins cried out in the distance. I found my start.

"Imagine you can feel empty space as far as you're able," I mumbled into her hair, my eyes still shut. She made a small noise of agreement. "As far as forever, all there is is nothing, flat space forever, and you know it goes even farther beyond your reach."

"There's never nothing," she whispered, imagining.

"Sorry?" She smiled at my confusion.

"If you can feel something, than it's not nothing," she explained. I blinked.

"You're right. Let me rephrase that, then," I continued. "Imagine you can feel something forever, but it's undisturbed by human or animal actions, even when they try to do so. Now, give that something a color."

"Aang..." she warned. "You know how I feel about colors."

"I'm trying, give me a sec," I said. Colors were the hardest part about this. There was no substitute for sight in defining colors.

"Blue is the sky's color," I started. I tried to assign meaning to 'blue.' "But 'blue' hardly covers it. There's so many different shades, hues, tints, blends with different color to create green or purple, gradual changes from light to lighter-"

"Twinkles Toes," she cut me off. "This means nothing to me."

My train of thought came to a grinding halt. She was right, again. All of those were sight-based observations.

"Okay, let's try again." I tried to think of something that could be felt, smelled, tasted or heard that was the epitome of blue.

"Pretend you're touching water," I started.

"Water is good," she mumbled, imagining again.

Her fingers caressed my sides, which was even more distracting than the foot rubbing.

"What does water feel like to you?"

"Wet. Generally cool or cold. Slimy, but not. Secretive."

"That's blue," I told her.

"Really? But isn't it transparent, too?" she asked, continuing to explore water with her mind.

"Well, that's not the only side of blue," I admitted. Suddenly a darker purpose of the color blue appeared in my mind. "Azula."

Her hands stopped moving. "What about her?"

"When she would firebend at or around you, did it seem... different than most bent fires?"

"It was hotter."

"Yeah. That was blue, too." We were quiet for a moment.

"Lemme get this straight," she said clearly through my clothes. "Blue is both fire and water."

"Yes. No. Augh!" I felt like pulling on the hair I didn't have. "Only sometimes."

"Okay." She seemed unconvinced.

"Normal fire is orange - the opposite of blue," I continued. "But the hotter it is, the bluer it becomes. It is strange, now that I think about it."

"Moving on."

"Right, so we have an endless space of nothing that is something the color of fire and water."

"Makes perfect sense."

"You're the one who wanted the description!" I retorted.

"Keep talking, Aang," she told me. "I love it when you talk," she added, almost as an after thought. Her foot stopped its rubbing to wrap itself more securely around my leg. By now she was halfway on top of me. Appa was having the time of his life, reveling in the feeling of wind and freedom again. I pulled her tighter to me, partly to make her feel safe as he flew higher and crazier, and partly because I just wanted to.

"Okay. Add to the blueness a brightness that feels like the sun on your skin and the shine- no, that's not right... tell me, Toph, what's blinding to your feet?"

"I'm gonna say the pun was not intended."

"Just answer the question."

She sighed. "Blinding to my feet? I guess the city is. So many different kinds of vibrations... possibly a herd of elephant-deer stampeding, or Appa landing really really hard-" said animal bellowed. "It's true, you giant beast of burden! You're huge!" I chuckled.

"All right. Now, add all of those feelings together and put it in the warmth of the sun and that's how bright it is up here."

She paused, taking it in. "That's pretty blinding."

I was getting better at explaining things now. "Clouds are even better," I told her. "They're air and water combined together-" I stopped, remembering with a pang what those two elements used to mean to me. Katara. She was ever a schoolboy's fantasy to me, a beautiful older girl only in my reach because of what I was, not who. It took me too long to realize the only feelings she had for me in the romantic area were those I imagined she had, but years of crushing just don't go away quickly, even when someone like Toph steps in to do damage control.

"Twinkle Toes? Air and water?" I jolted out of the reverie and blushed. I didn't need Katara anymore; I had Toph, and she was almost more than enough. If she had any idea about who I had been thinking about, she didn't hint at it.

"Right. Air and water. Clouds are more water than air, although they float across the sky in gravity-defying shapes that could only be achieved by the wind. Clouds are just as different from each other as shades of blue - sometimes they're thin and wispy, other times colossal and breathtaking."

"Are they blue, too, because of the water?"

"No, they're white, like - like the feeling of clean, ocean foam, snow, the ends of your fingernails, Appa's fur-" I took a clump of it and placed it in her hands to emphasize my point - "but they're not always white - sometimes they're gray like moonlight, even darker gray in a storm, bright pink or purple or orange - like flowers or flame - in a sunset. They're like prisms, or metal, an amplifier that absorbs all the light in the world and throws it back at you in a focused image that bowls you over if you actually look at it closely."

I stopped my rant naturally, then realized I had ranted, not all of it comprehensible. I was flushed by the time she spoke, but her words were so unexpected that I forgot to be embarrassed.

"But people don't always do that, do they? Look at it closely." When I didn't answer immediately, she went on, "I mean, here you are, spoutin' out this poetry about sun and sky, but I've never heard anyone else - even you - be so dramatic about it. Mostly it's just 'sun sure is bright today,' or 'looks like rain,' or even 'the clouds are pretty right now'."

"I guess you just get so used to seeing it that you take it for granted," I said as a means of explanation.

"What's it like right now, Twinkles?"

"Now?" I'd forgotten my eyes were closed until then. It required effort to open them, but open them I did.

Skies don't change much too quickly, I noticed. Everything was basically the same as a few moments before. A blanket of clouds covered the view of the earth below - a metaphor that could be taken to so many levels, I knew - but they weren't at all smooth. Bumps and ridges highlighted individual clouds in the bank as far as forever, blending into the lightest blue of sky at the horizon line in the distance. The eggshell curved above us, cresting in the middle without having curved up or down at all.

"Blue," I said first.

"Blue-water or blue-fire?"

"Blue-fire." We were high enough now that the air was getting thinner and harder to breathe. I bumped Appa's head with my ankle. "Down a bit, boy," I said, reminding him he had passengers. He grunted, but dove a hundred feet or so to a more respectable altitude.

"There's blue-fire all the way around us and above, lighter- paler- dustier towards the bottom, and deeper- no, darker- wait... more intense the higher up you look. Below is a cloud carpet, blocking out the view of the ground - you can't even hear the city - all bumpy and ridged and fluffy, like an endless koala-sheep blanket covering an infinite range of rolling hills, hills that are both bigger and smaller than you would think."

"What color are they?" she asked in a whisper, trying not to disturb the image I was creating.

"White. Gray, in places. A bit of pale yellow or brighter white from the sun's light here and there - it's mostly yellow during the day."

"What's yellow?"

"Butter is yellow," I said. I was really getting into this. "Sulfur. Saffron. Dirt without soil. Gold. Daffodils. Deserts. A lot of airbender clothes when they aren't orange."

"Wait - so you're telling me fire is the same color as airbender clothes?"

"I guess so."

"Hmph. You'd think those old-time Fire Nation guys who have more respect for people who shared a color with them."

Her logic blew me away with its simple profoundness. Being blind put more of a perspective on things than I'd ever imagined.

"Go on about yellow," she urged.

I looked down at the clouds again. "They're not all the way yellow - just a little accent here and there, like - like moss on a boulder."

She smiled. "I get that metaphor."

"It's not a metaphor, it's a simile," I corrected her mindlessly. Before she had a chance to protest, though, I went on, "It's a very faint twinge of yellow - it's a really new boulder, it just stopped rolling - but it's still there if you look."

"I think I get it now."

"Really?" I asked, hopeful and ecstatic. My descriptions had actually worked?

"Mmhmm." She burrowed her face deeper into my robes, no longer almost lying on top of me but fully. Her mouth was so muffled by fabric that I barely made out her say, "You're a sap."

My jaw dropped again, but this time in indignation. A sap? I was her boyfriend!

"Don't worry, I love you for it," she said, sliding up my body a hair to kiss me softly. "Thank you."

I huffed. "I don't like being called a sap."

"I know you don't," she consoled me. "I love your sky," she told me.

"My sky?"

"Of course! You're the last airbender, right? To all common knowledge, you and Appa are the only sky people around." I smiled sadly at the fact. "Anyway, even if you weren't, no one else could or would have talked so pretty for me." My sad smile changed into a grin as I closed the remaining inches between our lips and kissed her. Her hands slid up my back to rest on my shoulder blades, my own securing her to me at her neck and lower back. Her weight comfortably rested on me and drove all thoughts of poetry from my head as I drew her even closer, both protecting her and embracing her. Her hands went everywhere, exploring me with a blind person's curiosity, even though she already knew everything about me, ending up on and behind my face. At nineteen, we still had the residue of teenagers' lust in our veins, which showed whenever we even touched, much less when we made out. Eventually, she broke it off.

"Tell me more," she demanded, her lips slightly swollen and her blind eyes eager.

"What?"

"Go on! You were doing great! I want to hear about all the colors, about what I look like, what you look like, what's the difference between night and day, what does human beauty look like-"

I stopped her by putting my hand over her mouth, laughing. "Okay, okay! You have to be quiet, though, so I can!" Her mumbled protests behind my palm stopped. I slid her to my side again so I could breathe properly.

"So, what do you want to see first?"


End file.
